Rails

A couple of days ago, an HourPatch customer emailed me with a bug he'd found. When he created a time entry on a Saturday night, that entry would "jump" a week ahead on the schedule. I was able to fix it pretty quickly, and it turned out the problem related to time zone conversions, so I thought I'd share a little of what I learned when fixing that bug. Read more about Handling Time Zone Conversions in Rails

I stumbled across a problem, and then a solution, today, when deploying a Rails application to HostingRails. After I deployed, I started getting Application (500) Errors on all of my pages.

After talking with support, I found out that is was because the group write permission was being turned on on my dispatch.fcgi file. Looking further though, I realized that all of my deployed files had group write turned on! So, the question was, why? Read more about HostingRails and Capistrano Permissions Mismatch

As part of some of the new features I'm adding to Sphericle, I needed to add a ranking system for user accounts, based on a point system. Specifically, I needed to write a method for my User class (on the Sphericle server, which is a Rails app) that would give me the ranking for a User, based on how many points that User has compared to all the other Users.